The Null Device

2001/6/15

An old yet most interesting interview with Greg Egan, the Australian hard-scifi author.

Music is just as important to me, on a personal level, as literature, but any influence it has on my writing is usually pretty tangential. I did write a story called "Worthless" for In Dreams - a recent anthology on "the culture of the 7-inch single". I'm a big fan of The Smiths, so the first idea that occurred to me when I heard about the anthology was to try to write a kind of SF equivalent of a Smiths song - a story with the same ambivalent attitude to the whole idea of worthlessness, half-embracing it as a positive thing. That was a one-off, though. The only other story where music played a major role was "Beyond the Whistle Test", in which scientists use neural maps to design advertising jingles which you literally can't forget.
I don't want to write motherhood statements - feel-good stories that cave in at the end and do nothing but confirm everything you ever wanted to believe; I've done that in the past, and it's insidious. Stories like that should be burned. If I'm certain of anything, it's that understanding how the real world works - how human brains actually function, how morality and emotions and decisions actually arise - is essential to any kind of ethical stance which will make sense in the long term.
As Paul Davies has said, most Christian theologians have retreated from all the things that their religion supposedly asserts; they take a much more "modern" view than the average believer. But by the time you've "modernised" something like Christianity - starting off with "Genesis was all just poetry" and ending up with "Well, of course there's no such thing as a personal God" - there's not much point pretending that there's anything religious left. You might as well come clean and admit that you're an atheist with certain values, which are historical, cultural, biological, and personal in origin, and have nothing to do with anything called God.
Australia possesses thousands of subcultures, quite apart from any question of ethnicity. One of those subcultures consists of people who consider their nationality a vital part of their self-image; that's their right, but they should stop deluding themselves that everyone else thinks the same way. Nothing's more ridiculous than talking about the "unique Australian character" - unless it's talking about the "mystical qualities of the Australian landscape".

(ta, Peter!)

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NME has a track-by-track preview of the long-awaited upcoming New Order album, Get Ready, due on August 27. Interesting; some of the descriptions (the Smashing Pumpkins and Oasis influences, for example) sound a bit off-putting, other parts look potentially interesting (though it's hard to tell).

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Florida's illicit prostitution industry has found a way of avoiding undercover police stings: by requiring customers to expose themselves before the "models" do. Police are prohibited from exposing themselves, and the state won't authorise the use of informers. (via Plastic)

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Honour the work: Convicted mass murdered and prominent Melbourne High School Old Boy Julian Knight, currently serving a 27-year sentence, is compiling detailed files on prison guards and judges. The files contain names, addresses and the names of family members.

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